Who’s in and Who’s out!

… because I can’t say it any better myself. Here’s some good driving audio. Please, please listen. Also, take the survey that is posted below. Here’s a sermon from Greg Boyd, of Woodland Hills church, talking about the banquet parable and who’s invited into the kingdom.

This has it all: the demonic-ness of religiousity, “laying the smack down” on Christians that think they have it all figured out… the Holy Club (self-righteous), “God on the side of America,” priorities of Jesus followers, the God revealed in Jesus, the loving invitation that God gives to humanity. Sooo good!

And some extra words for thought from Shane Claiborne – Jesus for President

Perhaps the world would be willing to listen to a church on its knees, a church that doesn’t pretend to be perfect or to have all the answers. As we move toward hope and imagination, let’s begin with confession and call it like it is. We are in a mess. And it’s not just the world that’s in a mess. The calling and identity of the people of God in the midst of this world have become even more muddled…

Jesus is forming a new kind of people, a different kind of party, whose peculiar politics are embodied in who we are. The church is a people called out of the world to embody a social alternative that the world cannot know on its own terms…

If someone asks if we are Christ-followers, can we say, “Tell me what you see”? Is tehre enough evidence to prove that we are taking after the slaughtered Lamb? What if they ask the poor around us? What if they ask our enemies? Would they say that we love them? Christians havn’t always looked like Jesus. Perhaps the greatest barrier to Christ has been Christians who pronounce Jesus so loudly with their lips and deny him so loudly with their lives.

I’d say this is one of those polls, like most polls actually, that seem to be lacking in nuance. Questions of “message” and “delivery” are more complicated, multi-facted, and interconnected than is suggested by the options described here.

Also, the options provided are so wide-open as to have three different people click off the same selection, and mean three completely different things by doing so.

This is why I’ve always preferred essays to multiple-choice tests; they’re just so much more like real life. 🙂